Of all things in the world there is nothing, always excepting a good
mother, so worthy of honour as a good school. Our School was created for
the sons of officers in the Army and Navy, and filled with boys who
meant to follow their father’s calling.
It stood within two miles of Amyas Leigh’s house at Northam, overlooking
the Burroughs and the Pebble-ridge, and the mouth of the Torridge whence
the _Rose_ sailed in search of Don Guzmán. From the front dormitory
windows, across the long rollers of the Atlantic, you could see Lundy
Island and the Shutter Rock, where the _Santa Catherina_ galleon cheated
Amyas out of his vengeance by going ashore. If you have ever read
Kingsley’s “Westward Ho!” you will remember how all these things
happened.
Inland lay the rich Devonshire lanes and the fat orchards, and to the
west the gorse and the turf ran along the tops of the cliffs in combe
after combe till you come to Clovelly and the Hobby and Gallantry Bower,
and the homes of the Devonshire people that were old when the Armada was
new.
The Burroughs, lying between the school and the sea, was a waste of bent
rush and grass running out into hundreds of acres of fascinating
sand-hills called the Bunkers, where a few old people played golf. In
the early days of the School there was a small Club-house for golfers
close to the Pebble-ridge, but, one wild winter night, the sea got up
and drove the Pebble-ridge clean through the Club basement, and the
walls fell out, and we rejoiced, for even then golfers wore red coats
and did not like us to use the links. We played as a matter of course
and thought nothing of it.
Now there is a new Club-house, and cars take the old, red, excited men
to and from their game and all the great bunkers are known and written
about; but we were there first, long before golf became a fashion or a
disease, and we turned out one of the earliest champion amateur golfers
of all England.
It was a good place for a school, and that School considered itself the
finest in the world, excepting perhaps Haileybury, because it was
modelled on Haileybury lines and our caps were Haileybury colours; and
there was a legend that, in the old days when the School was new, half
the boys had been Haileyburians.
Our Head-master had been Head of the Modern Side at Haileybury, and,
talking it over with boys from other public schools afterwards, I think
that one secret of his great hold over us was that he was not a
clergyman, as so many head-masters are. As soon as a boy begins to think
in the misty way that boys do, he is suspicious of a man who punishes
him one day and preaches at him the next. But the Head was different,
and in our different ways we loved him.
Through all of five years I never saw him lose his temper, nor among two
hundred boys did any one at any time say or hint that he had his
favourites. If you went to him with any trouble you were heard out to
the end, and answered without being talked at or about or around, but
always _to_. So we trusted him absolutely, and when it came to the
choice of the various ways of entering the Army, what he said was so.
He knew boys naturally better than their fathers knew them, and
considerably better than they knew themselves. When the time came to
read for the Final Army Examinations, he knew the temper and powers of
each boy, the amount of training each would stand and the stimulus or
restraint that each needed, and handled them accordingly till they had
come through the big race that led into the English Army. Looking back
on it all, one can see the perfect judgment, knowledge of boys,
patience, and above all, power, that the Head must have had.
Some of the masters, particularly on the classical side, vowed that Army
examinations were making education no more than mark-hunting; but there
are a great many kinds of education, and I think the Head knew it, for
he taught us hosts of things that we never found out we knew till
afterwards. And surely it must be better to turn out men who do real
work than men who write about what they think about what other people
have done or ought to do.
A scholar may, as the Latin masters said, get more pleasure out of his
life than an Army officer, but only little children believe that a man’s
life is given him to decorate with pretty little things, as though it
were a girl’s room or a picture-screen. Besides, scholars are apt, all
their lives, to judge from one point of view only, and by the time that
an Army officer has knocked about the world for a few years he comes to
look at men and things “by and large,” as the sailors say. No books in
the world will teach that knack.
So we trusted the Head at school, and afterwards trusted him more.
There was a boy in the Canadian Mounted Police, I think, who stumbled
into a fortune—he was the only one of us who ever did—and as he had
never drawn more than seven shillings a day he very properly wrote to
the Head from out of his North Western wilds and explained his situation
proposing that the Head should take charge of and look after all his
wealth till he could attend to it; and was a little impatient when the
Head pointed out that executors and trustees and that sort of bird
wouldn’t hand over cash in that casual way. The Head was worth
trusting—he saved a boy’s life from diphtheria once at much greater risk
than being shot at, and nobody knew anything about it till years
afterwards.
But I come back to the School that he made and put his mark upon. The
boys said that those with whom Cheltenham could do nothing, whom
Sherbourne found too tough, and whom even Marlborough had politely asked
to leave, had been sent to the School at the beginning of things and
turned into men. They were, perhaps, a shade rough sometimes. One very
curious detail, which I have never seen or heard of in any school before
or since, was that the Army Class, which meant the Prefects, and was
generally made up of boys from seventeen and a half to nineteen or
thereabouts, was allowed to smoke pipes (cigarettes were then reckoned
the direct invention of the Evil One) in the country outside the
College. One result of this was that, though these great men talked a
good deal about the grain of their pipes, the beauty of their pouches,
and the flavour of their tobacco, they did not smoke to any ferocious
extent. The other, which concerned me more directly, was that it went
much harder with a junior whom they caught smoking than if he had been
caught by a master, because the action was flagrant invasion of their
privilege, and, therefore, rank insolence—to be punished as such. Years
later, the Head admitted that he thought something of this kind would
happen when he gave the permission. If any Head-master is anxious to put
down smoking nowadays, he might do worse than give this scheme a trial.
The School motto was, “Fear God, Honour the King”; and so the men she
made went out to Boerland and Zululand and India and Burma and Cyprus
and Hongkong, and lived or died as gentlemen and officers.
Even the most notorious bully, for whom an awful ending was prophesied,
went to Canada and was mixed up in Riel’s rebellion, and came out of it
with a fascinating reputation of having led a forlorn hope and behaved
like a hero.
All these matters were noted by the older boys, and when their fathers,
the grey-whiskered colonels and generals, came down to see them, or the
directors, who were K. C. B.’s and had been officers in their time, made
a tour of inspection, it was reported that the School tone was
“healthy.”
Sometimes an old boy who had blossomed into a Subaltern of the Queen
would come down for a last few words with the Head-master, before
sailing with the regiment for foreign parts; and the lower-school boys
were distracted with envy, and the prefects of the Sixth Form pretended
not to be proud when he walked with one of their number and talked about
“my men, you know,” till life became unendurable.
There was an unwritten law by which an old boy, when he came back to pay
his respects to the School, was entitled to a night in his old
dormitory. The boys expected it and sat up half the night listening to
the tales of a subaltern that the boy brought with him—stories about
riots in Ireland and camps at Aldershot, and all his first steps in the
wonderful world.
Sometimes news came in that a boy had died with his men fighting, and
the school said, “Killed in action, of course,” as though that were an
honour reserved for it alone, and wondered when its own chance would
come.
It was a curiously quiet School in many ways. When a boy was fourteen or
fifteen he was generally taken in hand for the Army Preliminary
Examination, and when that was past he was put down to “grind” for the
entrance into Sandhurst or Woolwich; for it was our pride that we passed
direct from the School to the Army, without troubling the “crammers.” We
spoke of “the Shop,” which means Woolwich, as though we owned it.
Sandhurst was our private reserve; and the old boys came back from
foreign parts and told us that India was only Westward Ho! spread thin.
On account of this incessant getting ready for examinations there was
hardly time for us (but we made it) to gather the beautiful Devonshire
apples, or to ferret rabbits in the sand-hills by the golf-links, and
saloon-pistols were forbidden because boys got to fighting-parties with
dust-shot, and were careless about guarding their eyes.
Nor were we encouraged to lower each other over the cliffs with a
box-rope and take the young hawks and jackdaws from their nests above
the sea. Once a rope broke, or else the boys above grew tired of holding
it, and a boy dropped thirty feet on to the boulders below. But as he
fell on his head nothing happened, except punishment at the other end
for all concerned.
In summer there was almost unlimited bathing from the Pebble-ridge, a
whale-backed bank four miles long of rounded grey boulders, where you
were taught to ride on the rollers as they came in, to avoid the
under-tow and to watch your time for getting back to the beach.
There was a big sea bath, too, in which all boys had to qualify for open
bathing by swimming a quarter of a mile, at least; and it was a matter
of honour among the school-houses not to let the summer end with a
single boy who could not “do his quarter,” at any rate.
Boating was impossible off that coast, but sometimes a fishing-boat
would be wrecked on Braunton Bar, and we could see the lifeboat and the
rocket at work; and once just after chapel there was a cry that the
herring were in. The School ran down to the beach in their Sunday
clothes and fished them out with umbrellas. They were cooked by hand
afterwards in all the studies and form-rooms till you could have smelt
us at Exeter.
But the game of the School, setting aside golf, which everyone could
play if he had patience, was foot-ball. Both cricket and foot-ball were
compulsory. That is to say, unless a boy could show a doctor’s
certificate that he was physically unfit to stand up to the wicket or go
into the scrimmage, he had to play a certain number of afternoons at the
game of the season. If he had engagements elsewhere—we called it
“shirking”—he was reasonably sure of three cuts with a ground-ash, from
the Captain of the Games delivered cold in the evening. A good player,
of course, could get leave off on any fair excuse, but it was a
beautiful rule for fat boys and loafers. The only unfairness was that a
Master could load you with an imposition to be shown up at a certain
hour, which, of course, prevented you from playing and so secured you a
licking in addition to the imposition. But the Head always told us that
there was not much justice in the world, and that we had better accustom
ourselves to the lack of it early.
Curiously enough, the one thing that the School did not understand was
an attempt to drill it in companies with rifles, by way of making a
volunteer cadet corps. We took our lickings for not attending that
cheerfully, because we considered it “playing at soldiers,” and boys
reading for the Army are apt to be very particular on these points.
We were weak in cricket, but our foot-ball team (Rugby Union) at its
best devastated the country from Blundell’s—we always respected
Blundell’s because “Great John Ridd” had been educated there—to Exeter,
whose team were grown men. Yet we, who had been taught to play together,
once drove them back over the November mud, back to their own
goal-posts, till the ball was hacked through and touched down, and you
could hear the long-drawn yell of “Schoo-_ool_! Schoo-_ool_!” as far as
Appledore.
When the enemy would not come to us our team went to the enemy, and if
victorious, would return late at night in a three-horse brake, chanting:
It’s a way we have in the Army,
It’s a way we have in the Navy,
It’s a way we have in the Public Schools,
Which nobody can deny!
Then the boys would flock to the dormitory windows, and wave towels and
join in the “Hip-hip-hip-hurrah!” of the chorus, and the winning team
would swagger through the dormitories and show the beautiful blue marks
on their shins, and the little boys would be allowed to get sponges and
hot water.
Very few things that the world can offer make up for having missed
a place in the First Fifteen, with its black jersey and
white—snow-white—knickerbockers, and the velvet skull-cap with the gold
tassel—the cap that you leave out in the rain and accidentally step upon
to make it look as old as if you had been in the First Fifteen for
years.
The other outward sign of the First Fifteen that the happy boy generally
wore through a hard season was the “jersey-mark”—a raw, red scrape on
ear and jawbone where the skin had been fretted by the rough jerseys in
either side in the steady drive of many scrimmages. We were trained to
put our heads down, pack in the shape of a wedge and shove, and it was
in that shape that the First Fifteen stood up to a team of trained men
for two and twenty counted minutes. We got the ball through in the end.
At the close of the winter term, when there were no more foot-ball teams
to squander and the Christmas holidays were coming, the School set
itself to the regular yearly theatricals—a farce and a three-act play
all complete. Sometimes it was “The Rivals,” or sometimes an attempt at
a Shakespearean play; but the farces were the most popular.
All ended with the School-Saga, the “_Vive la Compagnie!_” in which the
Senior boy of the School chanted the story of the School for the past
twelve months. It was very long and very difficult to make up, though
all the poets of all the forms had been at work on it for weeks; and the
School gave the chorus at the top of its voice.
On the last Sunday of the term the last hymn in chapel was “Onward,
Christian Soldiers.” We did not know what it meant then, and we did not
care, but we stood up and sang it till the music was swamped in the
rush. The big verse, like the “tug-of-war” verse in Mrs. Ewing’s “Story
of a Short Life,” was:
We are not divided,
All one body we,
One in faith and doctrine,
One in charity.
Then the organ would give a hurricane of joyful roars, and try to get us
in hand before the refrain. Later on, meeting our men all the world
over, the meaning of that hymn became much too plain.
Except for this outbreak we were not very pious. There was a boy who had
to tell stories night after night in the Dormitory, and when his stock
ran out he fell back on a book called “Eric, or Little by Little,” as
comic literature, and read it till the gas was turned off. The boys
laughed abominably, and there was some attempt to give selections from
it at the meeting of the Reading Society. That was quashed by authority
because it was against discipline.
There were no public-houses near us except tap-rooms that sold cider;
and raw Devonshire cider can only be drunk after a long and very hot
paper-chase. We hardly ever saw, and certainly never spoke to, anything
in the nature of a woman from one year’s end to the other; for our
masters were all unmarried. Later on, a little colony of mothers came
down to live near the School, but their sons were day-boys who couldn’t
do this and mustn’t do that, and there was a great deal too much
dressing up on weekdays and going out to tea, and things of that kind,
which, whatever people say nowadays, are not helpful for boys at work.
Our masters, luckily, were never gushing. They did not call us Dickie or
Johnnie or Tommy, but Smith or Thompson; and when we were undoubtedly
bad we were actually and painfully beaten with an indubitable cane on a
veritable back till we wept unfeigned tears. Nobody seemed to think that
it brutalized our finer feelings, but everybody was relieved when the
trouble was over.
Canes, especially when they are brought down with a drawing stroke,
sting like hornets; but they are a sound cure for certain offences; and
a cut or two, given with no malice, but as a reminder, can correct and
keep corrected a false quantity or a wandering mind, more completely
than any amount of explanation.
There was one boy, however, to whom every Latin quantity was an
arbitrary mystery, and he wound up his crimes by suggesting that he
could do better if Latin verse rhymed as decent verse should. He was
given an afternoon’s reflection to purge himself of his contempt; and
feeling certain that he was in for something rather warm, he turned
“_Donec gratus eram_” into pure Devonshire dialect, rhymed, and showed
it up as his contribution to the study of Horace.
He was let off, and his master gave him the run of a big library, where
he found as much verse and prose as he wanted; but that ruined his Latin
verses and made him write verses of his own. There he found all the
English poets from Chaucer to Matthew Arnold, and a book called
“Imaginary Conversations” which he did not understand, but it seemed to
be a good thing to imitate. So he imitated and was handed up to the
Head, who said that he had better learn Russian under his own eye, so
that if ever he were sent to Siberia for lampooning the authorities he
might be able to ask for things.
That meant the run of another library—English Dramatists this time;
hundreds of old plays; as well as thick brown books of voyages told in
language like the ringing of bells. And the Head would sometimes tell
him about the manners and customs of the Russians, and sometimes about
his own early days at college, when several people who afterwards became
great, were all young, and the Head was young with them, and they wrote
wonderful things in college magazines.
It was beautiful and cheap—dirt cheap, at the price of a permanent load
of impositions, for neglecting mathematics and algebra.
The School started a Natural History Society, which took the birds and
plants of North Devon under its charge, reporting first flowerings and
first arrivals and new discoveries to learned societies in London, and
naturally attracting to itself every boy in the School who had the
poaching instinct.
Some of us made membership an excuse for stealing apples and pheasant
eggs and geese from farmers’ orchards and gentlemen’s estates, and we
were turned out with disgrace. So we spoke scornfully of the Society
ever afterwards. None the less, some of us had our first introduction to
gunpowder in the shape of a charge of salt which stings like bees, fired
at our legs by angry game-keepers.
The institution that caused some more excitement was the School paper.
Three of the boys, who had moved up the School side by side for four
years and were allies in all things, started the notion as soon as they
came to the dignity of a study of their own with a door that would lock.
The other two told the third boy what to write, and held the staircase
against invaders.
It was a real printed paper of eight pages, and at first the printer was
more thoroughly ignorant of type-setting, and the Editor was more
completely ignorant of proof-reading, than any printer and any Editor
that ever was. It was printed off by a gas engine; and even the engine
despised its work, for one day it fell through the floor of the shop,
and crashed—still working furiously—into the cellar.
The paper came out at odd times and seasons, but every time it came out
there was sure to be trouble, because the Editor was learning for the
first time how sweet and good and profitable it is—and how nice it looks
on the page—to make fun of people in actual print.
For instance, there was friction among the study-fags once, and the
Editor wrote a descriptive account of the Lower School,—the classes
whence the fags were drawn,—their manners and customs, their ways of
cooking half-plucked sparrows and imperfectly cleaned blackbirds at the
gas-jets on a rusty nib, and their fights over sloe-jam made in a
gallipot. It was an absolutely truthful article, but the Lower School
knew nothing about truth, and would not even consider it as literature.
It is less safe to write a study of an entire class than to discuss
individuals one by one; but apart from the fact that boys throw books
and inkpots with a straighter eye, there is very little difference
between the language of grown-up people and that of children.
In those days the Editor had not learned this; so when the study below
the Editorial study threw coal at the Editorial legs and kicked in the
panels of the door, because of personal paragraphs in the last number,
the Editorial Staff—and there never was so loyal and hard-fighting a
staff—fried fat bacon till there was half an inch of grease in the pan,
and let the greasy chunks down at the end of a string to bob against and
defile the lower study windows.
When that lower study—and there never was a public so low and
unsympathetic as that lower study—looked out to see what was frosting
their window-panes, the Editorial Staff emptied the hot fat on their
heads, and it stayed in their hair for days and days, wearing shiny to
the very last.
The boy who suggested this sort of warfare was then reading a sort of
magazine, called _Fors Clavigera_, which he did not in the least
understand,—it was not exactly a boy’s paper,—and when the lower study
had scraped some of the fat off their heads and were thundering with
knobby pokers on the door-lock, this boy began to chant pieces of the
_Fors_ as a war-song, and to show that his mind was free from low
distractions. He was an extraordinary person, and the only boy in the
School who had a genuine contempt for his masters. There was no
affectation in his quiet insolence. He honestly _did_ despise them; and
threats that made us all wince only caused him to put his head a little
on one side and watch the master as a sort of natural curiosity.
The worst of this was that his allies had to take their share of his
punishments, for they lived as communists and socialists hope to live
one day, when everybody is good. They were bad, as bad as they dared to
be, but their possessions were in common, absolutely. And when “the
Study” was out of funds they took the most respectable clothes in
possession of the Syndicate, and leaving the owner one Sunday and one
week-day suit, sold the rest in Bideford town. Later, when there was
another crisis, it was _not_ the respectable one’s watch that was taken
by force for the good of the Study and pawned, and never redeemed.
Later still, money came into the Syndicate honestly, for a London paper
that did not know with whom it was dealing, published and paid a whole
guinea for some verses that one of the boys had written and sent up
under a nom-de-plume, and the Study caroused on chocolate and condensed
milk and pilchards and Devonshire cream, and voted poetry a much sounder
business than it looks.
So things went on very happily till the three were seriously warned that
they must work in earnest, and stop giving amateur performances of
“Aladdin” and writing librettos of comic operas which never came off,
and worrying their house-masters into grey hairs.
Then they all grew very good, and one of them got into the Army; and
another—the Irish one—became an engineer, and the third one found
himself on a daily paper half a world away from the Pebble-ridge and the
sea-beach. The three swore eternal friendship before they parted, and
from time to time they met boys of their year in India, and magnified
the honour of the old School.
The boys are scattered all over the world, one to each degree of land
east and west, as their fathers were before them, doing much the same
kind of work; and it is curious to notice how little the character of
the man differs from that of the boy of sixteen or seventeen.
The general and commander-in-chief of the Study, he who suggested
selling the clothes, never lost his head even when he and his friends
were hemmed round by the enemy—the Drill Sergeant—far out of bounds and
learning to smoke under a hedge. He was sick and dizzy, but he rose to
the occasion, took command of his forces, and by strategic manœuvres
along dry ditches and crawlings through tall grass, outflanked the enemy
and got into safe ground without losing one man of the three.
A little later, when he was a subaltern in India, he was bitten by a mad
dog, went to France to be treated by Pasteur, and came out again in the
heat of the hot weather to find himself almost alone in charge of six
hundred soldiers, and his Drill Sergeant dead and his office clerk run
away, leaving the Regimental books in the most ghastly confusion. Then
we happened to meet; and as he was telling his story there was just the
same happy look on his face as when he steered us down the lanes with
the certainty of a superior thrashing if we were caught.
And there were others who went abroad with their men, and when they got
into tight places behaved very much as they had behaved at foot-ball.
The boy who used to take flying jumps on to the ball and roll over and
over with it, because he was big and fat and could not run, took a
flying jump onto a Burmese dacoit whom he had surprised by night in a
stockade; but he forgot that he was much heavier than he had been at
School, and by the time he rolled off his victim the little dacoit was
stone dead.
And there was a boy who was always being led astray by bad advice, and
begging off punishment on that account. He got into some little scrape
when he grew up, and we who knew him knew, before he was reprimanded by
his commanding officer, exactly what his excuse would be. It came out
almost word for word as he was used to whimper it at School. He was
cured, though by being sent off on a small expedition where he alone
would be responsible for any advice that was going, as well as for fifty
soldiers.
And the best boy of all—he was really good, not book good—was shot in
the thigh as he was leading his men up the ramp of a fortress. All he
said was, “Put me up against that tree and take my men on”; and when the
men came back he was dead.
Ages and ages ago, when Queen Victoria was shot at by a man in the
street, the School paper made some verses about it that ended like this:
One school of many, made to make
Men who shall hold it dearest right
To battle for their ruler’s sake,
And stake their being in the fight,
Sends greeting, humble and sincere,
Though verse be rude and poor and mean,
To you, the greatest as most dear,
Victoria, by God’s Grace, our Queen!
Such greetings as should come from those
Whose fathers faced the Sepoy hordes,
Or served you in the Russian snows
And dying, left their sons their swords.
For we are bred to do your will
By land and sea, wherever flies
The Flag to fight and follow still,
And work your empire’s destinies.
Once more we greet you, though unseen
Our greetings be, and coming slow.
Trust us, if need arise, O Queen!
We shall not tarry with the blow.
And there are one or two places in the world that can bear witness how
the School kept its word.